Hit our ‘Brilliant Books‘ tag and you’ll be confronted by an array of awesome reading. But one thing that struck me recently was that it’s almost all fiction. No big shock there I guess: we poor cave prisoners – I mean, OW, yes, all right, grateful guests – are all storytellers of one kind or another. Still, I think for my next couple of ‘Brilliant Books’ posts I’m going to go with some non-fiction…

Here’s Whoops! or Why Everyone Owes Everyone And No One Can Pay by John Lanchester. It’s a book about the current world financial crisis and what caused it, and it’s recently come out in paperback.

Are you wondering what I’m doing talking about book like this here, on a blog about books for young people? I’ll tell you: the greatest triumph of Whoops! is that – without over-simplifying the details of what can appear (deliberately I think) to be a forbiddingly complex subject – it’s a book that can be read and understood by anyone.

I’m serious: if you can read, you can read this book. In fact, you should. In the UK we’re about to experience the biggest cuts to public spending and services that have ever been attempted. If you want to know why that’s happening – why your school library can’t afford new books and your local public library is in danger of being closed, why you had to wait five hours in A&E before a doctor would see you when you broke your arm, why your family is worried about money – then read this book and you’ll find out.

The only sense in which this book is difficult to read is that it may make you angry. Successive governments around the world have allowed all our lives to be lashed to the activities of a small group of people who don’t do or make or care about anything except recklessly chasing quick profit for themselves. Moreover, our politicians have recently failed once more to take any real steps to curb them, or stop the current crisis from happening again. It’s not a good feeling. But it’s an important truth, and the younger you are when you discover it, the sooner you can start thinking about how to do something about it.

This is one of the absolute best books I’ve read this year. The champagne bottle on its new cover is appropriate: the contents fizz with wit and verve and passion. I’d recommend Whoops! to everyone.

Sam

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